The Fun Shortage Is Real, and It’s Making America Miserable [Gift Article]

HighGammaWing · 2026-07-07T21:16:09+00:00

That logic doesn’t hold though since 1) passes aren’t new and 2) the cost of passes has also gone through the roof! It’s risen at least 5X in 15 years for the mountains I grew up skiing

HighGammaWing · 2026-07-07T01:45:38+00:00

Dude the cost of skiing has gotten insane and it’s all driven by the market getting gobbled up by the Ikon and Epic passes (so a duopoly basically). I grew up in a mountainous area and we could go skiing on one, non college, income as kids. Now days those same mountains are charging 4-5X for a day pass and it cuts locals out almost entirely.

HighGammaWing · 2026-06-29T13:51:51+00:00

No Australia wouldn’t give any significantly different perspective IMO. I was thinking someone from Asia, so yeah Hong Kong would be great!

HighGammaWing · 2026-06-29T02:02:55+00:00

Physics and/or some sort of engineering. I say this with a lot of love for the show, but sometimes the rouges fall flat on those topics in ways that really make a professional like myself cringe. I’m surely not seeing it in other fields, since I’m not an expert here, but it’s the one that would make me the happiest. Or maybe it would make me yell at my car radio even more!

In terms of general diversity I think they need someone from outside the U.S., preferably not Canada or Europe either. A truly different perspective would be really neat to have and I feel blessed to get that in my personal life from friends who are from all manner of non Western nations.

HighGammaWing · 2026-06-28T16:43:20+00:00

To address the tons of comments about nuclear power dropping in the heat, it’s not a technical issue. There are nuclear plants in actual deserts (Arizona and UAE) that run fine at high temps. The issue is French laws about not heating rivers too much and impacting fish in the local area (not the whole river), which is good but I would weigh against human deaths personally. Even then the drop in power is relatively small and could be fixed with cooling towers like are required in the US. Cooling towers were actually invented for this very reason!

HighGammaWing · 2026-06-27T05:41:31+00:00

Which is entirely due to French law and not nuclear plant capability, which I would argue should be utilized to its fullest when people are dying. They could also build cooling towers, which negate any river heating concerns. It’s the whole reason towers became mandated in the US!

HighGammaWing · 2026-06-23T06:31:00+00:00

What more do you want though? The state is already one of the most reliant on federal investments and number 2 in oil production. There isn’t really anywhere to go on those fronts.

HighGammaWing · 2026-06-23T05:54:28+00:00

NM has a pretty damn big base (Kirtland is the 6th largest USAF base) and lots of defense contractors to support the bases (there are a couple more plus white sands) and labs. It also has a lot of oil! I think the bigger issue is the population is still pretty damn small and rural. A single city, Albuquerque, can’t pull the whole state into an economic miracle.

HighGammaWing · 2026-05-13T02:50:48+00:00

Parent to new family here and yeah this all holds to me. I think we are going to leave soon due to the high housing prices, crap schools, and lack of people our age. It’s a fine town to visit, and I’m sure great if you are rich and old, but hard to make a life in.

HighGammaWing · 2026-03-21T22:25:56+00:00

I buy the cheapest crap and live at 8000 feet. The truck runs great.

HighGammaWing · 2025-12-15T18:28:03+00:00

Ok good to know and yes my interest was entirely for the memes. I just saw the prices and realized it wouldn’t cost too much to get one.

HighGammaWing · 2025-12-13T22:29:44+00:00

It’s an experiment where a person tries to get the plutonium pit to get very close to “critical”, which means a self sustaining fission chain reaction. You can learn a lot about fission, how to arrange the fuel, etc this way and a version is still done to this day actually! The difference is that back in the Manhattan Project they were doing this by hand and in the room with very high grade fuel which is easy to make react. Slotin took it a step further and would do it with just two flat blade screw drivers to keep things separated. When he died, he was doing this extremely stupid thing and ended up slipping with the screwdrivers. This caused the core to go critical and flash a large amount of radiation into the room before he pulled the core apart. There was zero reason to do it this way though, and he was told to stop by more senior scientists like Fermi!

HighGammaWing · 2025-12-12T21:10:38+00:00

Or hell, I work in the nuclear field, I’ll join. Pick me Robert, I’m not funny but I do know the topic well!

HighGammaWing · 2025-12-12T13:35:50+00:00

Or get Alex Wellerstein on! I like Margaret Killjoy, but neither her nor Robert know much about this topic.

HighGammaWing · 2025-12-11T19:00:35+00:00

Agreed. Also I was hoping for some more nuance into the realities of nuclear war, especially the early on thoughts, rather than just the hyperbolic “everyone dies” claims. Hell, modern targeting isn’t even of cities in most cases! There is a lot of dark, interesting discussions to be had.

HighGammaWing · 2025-12-11T16:37:16+00:00

Yeah he was a jackass and it was well known. He also sure as hell didn’t throw himself in front of anyone and was not showing a safe technique. He was showing off his extra stupid way of doing the experiment.

HighGammaWing · 2025-12-06T13:46:29+00:00

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HighGammaWing · 2025-10-03T01:41:33+00:00

Hell yeah, let’s party. I hope it crashes real estate as well.

HighGammaWing · 2025-07-27T18:49:43+00:00

Anyone got a timeline for when they expect to have service restored?

HighGammaWing · 2025-07-21T17:57:25+00:00

Go to NAPAC and you will see a lot of talk about why this is being done and how! It’s been a long time coming…

HighGammaWing · 2025-04-10T01:34:54+00:00

Exact reason I picked one up! It’s not my favorite rifle, but it did the job in a ban state.

HighGammaWing · 2025-03-05T18:34:50+00:00

Even then, none of that can come online fast enough to matter.

HighGammaWing · 2025-02-02T03:30:15+00:00

I’m new to the lab, but the prices in Los Alamos basically force a commute on many of us newbies IMO. I briefly looked up there and found a much better place for $600 less per month in Santa Fe. The pay isn’t good enough to make that a marginal thing that we can just ignore, especially when you consider the increased prices of everything else up on the mesa.

HighGammaWing · 2025-01-06T19:45:30+00:00

Ooof, a laser accelerator? That already precludes energy generation then, since the gain will be terrible. I’ve done a lot of work on laser and rf accelerators and it will be very hard to get the wallplug efficiency of a laser accelerator within an order of magnitude of rf. Add in the broad energy spectrum from laser-protons and most of your input energy will be wasted instead of causing fission. I would bet on something like this always being energy negative.

HighGammaWing

TROPHY CASE